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Magic Monday
Midnight is upon us and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.
The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. This is my seventy-eighth published book and nineteenth novel, a stand-alone (so far) tale set in 2095 or so. You could call it cli-fi (the current cute label for climate change fiction) if you like, or deindustrial SF; I'd call it a deindustrial noir Shinto science fiction spy thriller with Gnostic overtones. Jerry Shimizu, the two-fisted, gun-toting, half-Japanese tough guy who narrates the story, and the world in which he lives are interesting enough, at least to me, that he may get a sequel...but we'll see. If you're interested, you can get copies here in the US and here elsewhere.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***
Reincarnation
(Anonymous) 2025-05-19 05:14 am (UTC)(link)I recently had a dream in which a voice said "You died in ____" (place name), or maybe it said "I died in _____. I googled it when I woke up, and there really is such a place. (It's in another country, where there was a genocide a century ago.) I wish I could ask it more details.
Anyway, this makes me wonder things. Like, what precisely is my connection to the person who died? It is easy to say that I am him / her reincarnated, but on the other hand, the situation could just as easily be described by saying that I am only receiving messages from the dead. Either way, there is a sort of spiritual connection--it doesn't necessarily have to be a soul that hops from body to body. Or maybe my whole idea is a kind of psychological symbol, like in Jung or Corbin, and not to be taken literally. Maybe I "resonate" with this time period, without literally having been there. That might better explain all those people who had past lives as biblical characters, or other famous people. I know that you recall some aspects of your past lives. How did you make sense of the experience? Or did you just know?
I also wonder what kind of karma is going on. The whole idea of karma assumes a certain set of ethical values, that in turn assume human biology (life and death and so on). Maybe genocide is wrong even if death is not the end, because of these values. But if we are all bound within a single karmic system, and are subject to the same rules / values, this is kind of like the traditional God who judges people. And if "you create your own reality," then that would apply to karma too, no? I know you're a polytheist--what's your take on this?
It occurs to me that my ideas are molded by certain 19th-20th century occult traditions about reincarnation. If I had gravitated towards other ones--Shinto ones, perhaps--I would have very different preconceptions. Can we ever really transcend our milieu? (Except by dying, I mean!)
Thank you very much for whatever insight you can offer.
Re: Reincarnation
1) It's possible to come up with an infinite number of theories to explain any set of data. On that basis, it's possible to come up with almost any explanation you like to account for apparent past life memories. Keep in mind, though, that all the things you've suggested could be used just as well to account for your memories of last month. Do you really know for sure that you had those experiences? Maybe you're a brain in a bottle, after all, and got programmed to remember those things!
The most straightforward explanation for past life memories is that people have past lives. This doesn't mean that everybody who claims to remember a past life memory is right, or for that matter honest; there are plenty of things that can cause confabulated memories -- hypnosis of the "past life regression" type being the most common these days. It does mean that if coherent, consistent recollections that seem to come from a past life begin to surface, it's not unreasonable to take them as such -- especially if they explain quirks in your present life.
2) No, karma does not assume a system of ethics. Karma has nothing to do with ethics. It's not a scheme of rewards and punishments. Karma is simply the law of cause and effect. I've written a blog post about that, which you can read here:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-law-of-consequences/
3) No, you can't transcend your milieu. More precisely, your personality -- the temporary identity you've taken on in this life -- can't transcend its milieu, because its milieu is an essential part of its experience of incarnation. When you die or become enlightened, and the personality dissolves back into your individuality -- the real you, the face you had before your mother and father were born -- you incorporate the lessons of that life and milieu and learn from them. Then you go on to the next one.
Re: Reincarnation
Re: Reincarnation
(Anonymous) 2025-05-19 10:19 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Reincarnation
(Anonymous) 2025-05-19 08:25 pm (UTC)(link)One way to start there would be to ask, "what policy would I have ideally advised myself to follow, with respect to acting on information about past lives -- or even ordinary memories -- that might unreflectively have seemed to be 'mine', if I'd been 'one' or 'both' of a twin partly conjoined at the brain, or if I were to 'be' 'a' severe epilepsy patient who'd just had a surgery to sever 'my' corpus callosum, or indeed if I were one of two conjoined twins that had been joined at the brain but then surgically separated, or if I were to have transcranial magnetic stimulation suspending the operations of one or another of my mental faculties?"
And then, if you got anywhere with those questions, you might think through, say, the reports about the effects of heart transplants.
I expect that some of the important underlying entities in abstractions like 'I' or 'my past' are smaller context-dependent bits of behavioral tendencies and acquired knowledge and skills, plus little bits of learned information about the typical consequences of loosing or restraining such tendencies. And if I was designing a system of karma, one of my big concerns would be to come up with a way to even-handedly promote or inhibit the propagation or alteration of such little bits of tendency, according to their demonstrated (even if only presumably-inevitably contextual) fitness for whatever larger purpose I might have had in view. Reading between the lines of this universe and its apparent karma system, the corresponding hypothetical larger purpose seems to partly cash out in terms of its implications as something like, "don't waste too much attention trying to work out out how to build systems out of propensities that would be ultimately self-defeating and make the system non-functional if the system were larger", except a lot more Taoist than that formulation might make it sound like.
Maybe that's not speaking to your direct questions, but your questions are partly made out of some underlying questions that are interconnected. I hope I have managed to sketch how those questions are interconnected.
Re: Reincarnation
(Anonymous) 2025-05-19 10:28 pm (UTC)(link)